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Over the last two years, radically conservative Republicans have attempted one whale of a David Copperfield on us. These extremists from the right have donned revolutionary-age costumes, taped teabags to their hats and held ignorant and inflammatory signs in front of them in the hope that other Americans wouldn't be able to recognize them for who they were.......the same old extreme Republican right. The Republican right of Barry Goldwater's shameful segregationist philosophy, the Republican right of Dick Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and Karl Rove's "southern strategy" of bigotry.

Poll watchers in Harris County, Texas --
where a Tea Party group launched an aggressive anti-voter fraud effort -- were accused of
"hovering over" voters, "getting into election workers' faces" and blocking or disrupting lines of voters who were waiting to cast their ballots as early voting got underway yesterday.

Sounds similar to the 2000 Florida presidential recount, doesn't it?

The above picture is of Republican operatives who had been flown to Florida in 2000 to stage a "spontaneous" protest to STOP counting the votes. The number next to each person in the picture identifies each one of the Republican political activists in the entirely fabricated media stunt.

That's what Republicans do when they want to interfere with counting or recounting votes in a close election. They try to stop the counting if their candidate is ahead....even if they have to masquerade as some fictitious, spontaneous, "grassroots" outrage group, in order to do it.

But close elections that present an opportunity for Republicans to quickly "create reality" and steal elections.....like the Brooks Brothers "riot" of 2000......can't be consistently depended upon.

At the same time, Republicans intimidating minority voters, who mostly vote for Democrats,........can always be depended upon to scare away at least some minorities who don't relish the potential confrontation. Voter ID laws are meant for the same purpose....to intimidate older, mostly poorer, minority voters.

Royal Masset, former political director of the Republican party of Texas said that voter ID laws.....like Ohio's....

would cause a drop off in legitimate Democratic votes and give the GOP a three percent boost.

And that's the goal again in several regions of the nation this voting season. Like in Illinois.....California....and like in Houston, Texas......

Harris County, the biggest county in the state, is where a Tea Party group called the King Street Patriots launched an anti-voter fraud initiative called
"True the Vote," which recruited poll watchers and amped up fears over groups like the community organizing group ACORN.

Chad Dunn, a lawyer who is representing the Texas Democratic Party, told TPMMuckraker a number of witnesses have been interviewed by Civil Rights Division lawyers already. "We've gotten a number of reports -- quite a few out of the Houston area -- that poll watchers, King Street Patriot training poll watchers, are following a voter after they've checked them out and stand right behind them," Dunn said. There's at least a dozen reports that they could confirm with witnesses, he said. "Interestingly, it's all in the polling places in Hispanic and African-American areas," he added.

The word.."interestingly"...in the last sentence should have been "predictably."

True the Vote produced a video about the threat of voter fraud, now removed from their site, which was later found to feature a doctored photo of a woman holding a sign reading "I only got to vote once."

This is what anti-democratic Republican extremists who claim they "want their country back"....yet also claim they are not bigots... do. Try to stifle the democratic process any way they can in the hopes of "winning" elections. If complete lies need to be repeated in order to win...so be it. If intimidating minority voters is what it takes to gain an edge....then so be it.

Take note....this voter intimidation program in Houston is being led by the Tea Party. And those Texas Tea Partiers, despite claims that there is not one racist bone in the entire Tea Klan, are singling out blacks and Hispanics to intimidate. You do the math.

The kicker to all of this is that a person is more likely to get struck by lightning than be impersonated by somebody else at the election polls. During the last Republican legislative effort to stop Democrats from voting....the voter ID scam....the Supreme Court couldn't find even ONE case of a fraudulent vote.